Why camping is a passion-killer

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/04/camping-passion-killer-wet-wipes-metaphor-love

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There is nothing – absolutely nothing – as fatal for a burgeoning romance than to watch a near-stranger sluice themselves down with a wet wipe.

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The last thing you need, when the sticky buds of potential love start to appear on the branches of single life, is to go camping. Sliding into a nylon shroud of foot-smelling claustrophobia beside someone you’ve only known for a short while, beneath the insane flapping of a top sheet in the middle of a field is the relationship equivalent of putting your arm in the mouth of a Rottweiler. You might get away with it; but it’s very likely that you won’t.

As the season of music festivals and midge bites, camping weddings and weekend getaways, open fires and starry nights rolls merrily on, I issue a stark warning: beware of camping.

Camping is supposed to be romantic. You’re meant to cling to each other under an open sky, count the stars, stare into the dying embers of the fire where you recently baked a potato and sigh at the simple earthly pleasures of it all. But the truth, more often, is that you’re bent over in the drizzle, hammering a tent peg into bedrock, a smear of sheep excrement up one thigh and a plaster on the other, while a kid with a tambourine smashes around less than 10 feet away.

When I was 18 I went to Glastonbury with my first-ever boyfriend. It could have been so exciting. It could have been romantic and adventurous, heavy with an unearned sense of adult pleasure and rural hedonism. In fact, we had a bitter fight about the patches of mould on our groundsheet and went to sleep with a Berlin Wall of damp loo roll stacked between us that nearly reached the tent poles. It may be true that you should never go to bed on an argument but when you’re confined to a two-metre square surrounded by chemically confused teenagers trying to dance out of their new cheesecloth tops, you don’t really have much of an option. In the morning, seeking respite if not reconciliation, I crawled out to see his friend Jack biting into a “noodle sandwich”, which consisted of a badly cooked packet of super noodles squashed between white slices of bread that looked like a perm pressed between two mattresses. This merely confirmed that camping at festivals is as romantic as pushing a carrot up your nose.

A few years ago I went camping with another man. It was our second date. We were in the middle of nowhere, settled in the foothills of a mountain, miles from anyone else, with nothing but rocks and reeds as far as the eye could see. As we lay across our sheet of tarpaulin, staring up at the night sky he turned to me, moved in very close to my face and whispered “I’m not actually here. I don’t exist. You’re all alone in the middle of a field talking to thin air”. I should have known then what I have only come to realise now; he wasn’t marriage material. But when you’re pegged into a rectangle of moss, a polite exit isn’t much of an option. Of course, people will make ill-judged jokes in bars or accidentally reveal too much over a meal but when you’re camping, it’s not so easy to jump on a bus and head home.

The problem with camping is that it is at once incredibly intimate and unhygienic

The problem with camping is that it is at once incredibly intimate and unhygienic. It is not where you want to cement a new relationship. You spend the majority of time inside the tent bent over like a roasting prawn and the majority of the time outside the tent wearing a fleece. Nobody looks sexy in a fleece. Nobody swells with lust at the rustle of waterproof trousers. I may be as outdoorsy as a badger in hiking boots but even I know when I’m beaten.

Camping with your partner could be a different kettle of butane altogether. It may well be the stuff of postcards and poetry if you know each other well enough not to recoil at the sight of their GoreTex-clad knees pumping away at an air mattress. I couldn’t say. And camping with friends is a four-poled paragon of pleasure – all early mornings and smokey nights, with people you love but don’t have to watch struggle into a pair of pants at a Z-like angle. But for the single person – the festival reveller and ringless wedding guest – camping can be as much a hurdle as a pleasure.

Unless, of course, I’m wrong. Unless the thing about love is that it is just like camping. That sometimes you have to put your back into it. You have to build something ridiculous out of poles and elasticated sticks in the face of a howling gale. Pick your way past thistles and try to drive some foundations into frozen ground. Perhaps you have to make your own bed. And lie in it. And hope for the best. Because one day, some day, you will have pitched it perfectly.

But if you haven’t, well, give me a call. We can go camping.